[LINK] Television archival

[Tom Worthington]

At 12:23 PM 15/11/2007, Antony Barry wrote:
>On 15/11/2007, at 2:00 AM, Kim Holburn wrote:
>
>>Surely it would come under the purview of the NLA.
>
>Nope. National Film and Sound Archive <http://www.nfsa.afc.gov.au/>

But a search of the TV archive for "politics", found only 196 items: 
<http://colsearch.nfsa.afc.gov.au/nfsa/search/summary/summary.w3p;adv=;group=;groupequals=;page=0;parentid=;query=politics%20Media%3A%22TELEVISION%22;querytype=;resCount=10>.

Unlike print publications, there is no requirement for broadcasters 
to lodge with the archive and no automatic right for the public to 
access the information.

Perhaps the solution would be to regard the closed captions, which 
are now on most TV programs, as being a print publication (the 
copyright on the closed captions of a program is separate to that of 
the audio and video). The NLA could then collect it, and as it is a 
very small text file, it would be very inexpensive to hold and easy 
to search. For research purposes the text of what a politician said 
is probably more useful than the audio or video anyway.

Collecting the closed caption text would require a few digital set 
top boxes and a very small computer. Broadcasters might be happy to 
have the archive provide the closed captions, if it results in 
referrals to their own web site.

ABC TV have searching available on some news content. There have been 
many schemes to search and reference video by the closed caption 
text. An example is Google Video <http://video.google.com.au/>. This 
was released in 2005 
<http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/video.html>. But the 
service does not appear to have been popular, either with the public 
or the broadcasters. The Internet Archive also has some video 
<http://www.archive.org/>.

On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 07:35:30AM -0800, Michael Still wrote:

 > Well, I do know that a lot of Goodies and Doctor Who are lost. ...

The Australian Archives had some of the scenes from missing Dr Who 
episodes, which the censor had cut out of the programs and kept 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes#_ref-revisited_4>. 
The Archives run a display of these occasionally.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, ANU